I had other plans for today but then I received an email from the UK magazine The Idler. This isn’t a new phenomenon, or unwanted by any means. I’ve been happily getting their newsletter to keep up with all of their goings on for a few years now. And while Idler doesn’t always have pertinent…
Hey everyone, as the title implies this is just the text version. The audio version of my presentation will be put up tomorrow and will be via my Youtube channel. Thanks! Introduction My name is Nick Ford and for around a year now I’ve been running a site called AbolishWork.com. In that time I’ve been…
Or so I’ve gathered from the following video by the Youtube user chunkymark…
(Taken from here) Preface M. Thiers, at a private session of the commission on primary education of 1849, said: “I wish to make the influence of the clergy all powerful because I count upon it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches man that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philosophy…
In order to dismiss the current philosophers who LaFargue disagrees with he uses a mix of history and philosophy against the “moralists”: Let us open the history of ancient peoples and the writings of their philosophers and law givers. “I could not affirm,” says the father of history, Herodotus, “whether the Creeks derived from the…
First off, I really like the title to this chapter. It invokes Spring and a certain freeness to me. The ability to structure not only new things but things in a new context to support these new things. It’s just a nice phrase in general, really. Lafargue builds off his latest conclusions that giving the laborer more time…
While I was planning to finish this series in a week things got in the way…okay mostly laziness and shitty internet. We are off to a good start with LaFargue considering promises of the Greek poet Antiparos who more or less claimed that new technology would liberate us from work. That it would give us…
What would this series be without a few delays? Hopefully this much longer post makes up for it! First, just look at the passage that Lagargue quotes at the beginning from a pamphlet entitled An Essay on Trade and Commerce: …the factory population of England had taken into its head the fixed idea that in their quality…
There is always a bit of contradictions or weirdness with the pro-lazy position and it’s really well emphasized in the quote LaFargue puts at the top of this chapter: Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy. – Lessing People always want to make fun of the pro-lazy position,…
Starting today and into most of next week I will be excerpting and analyzing Paul LaFargue’s The Right to be Lazy (or alternatively here). Heaping praise and raising criticisms where I think necessary. I can’t promise much content in a given post but hopefully we’ll all get something out of it. After this is all…